How can immigration have a negative impact on the environment? Those people already exist, don't they? How will just moving from one place to the other alter how much waste they generate?
Carrying Capacity's Jason DinAlt explains:
http://www.carryingcapacity.org/DinAlt.htm"Since many other authors have dealt with the fertility component of the damage done by unrestrained population growth, I will focus upon the immigration component,
though the higher than average fertility rate of immigrants means that there is significant overlap between the two."
"Overwhelmingly, the reason people migrate to the U.S. is to improve their standard of living. This will change the impact they have on various natural resources. In other words, immigrants change their consumption and pollution patterns. It is often easy to quantify these changes - just measure their resource impact both before and after migration, and then compute the percentage change:"
The percentage change in pollution or depletion rate for one resource =
(U.S. per capita rate - sending country's per capita rate) x 100
---------------------------------------------------------------
sending country's per capita rate.
For example. consider someone who migrates from a hypothetical country where the average ChloroFlouroCarbon (CFC) emission per capita is 0.02 metric tons. When that person comes to America emission increases to 0.52 metric tons. That person's resource impact has increased by 2500%. The calculation is simple:"
(.52 - .02) x 100
-----------------
.02
Total U.S. fertility is 2.1 (replacement level), and has been growing rapidly for two decades.
| Caucasian | 1.7 |
| African-American | 2.5 |
| Asian | 2.5 |
| Hispanic | 3.9 |
As an example of what DinAlt is illustrating, his table shows that a Vietnamese immigrant in the US will have a 9,249% increase in energy consumption relative to the standard of living in their native homeland, as well as a 7,071% increase in CO
2 generation, 175 % in methane production, 2,365 % in fresh water consumption, 802 % in fertilizer consumption, 11,214% in pesticide consumption. The average Indian will experience a 32,350% (!) increase in automobile usage.
Consumption/Pollution Changes for Legal Immigrants Coming From the Ten Main Sending Countries
| COUNTRY | exUSSR | Philippines | Vietnam | Mexico | China | India | Dom.Rep. | Korea | Jamaica | Iran |
| Number of Legal Immigrants | 56,839 | 55,376 | 55,278 | 52,866 | 31,629 | 31,165 | 30,177 | 21,628 | 18,025 | 16,019 |
| Energy Consumption | 55 % | 3386 % | 9249 % | 508 % | 1182% | 3236% | 2506 % | 358 % | 1087 % | 507 % |
| Cattle Production | -4 % | 1379 % | 751 % | 16 % | 499 % | 73 % | 29 % | 684 % | 236 % | 166 % |
| Fish Production | -41 % | -31 % | 77 % | 44 % | 134 % | 443 % | 658 % | -65 % | 435 % | 384 % |
| CFC Production | 125 % | 3155 % | ------- | 824 % | 4851% | 11,025% | ------- | 346 % | 28 % | 850 % |
| CO2 (Industrial) | 48 % | 2877 % | 7071 % | 441 % | 832 % | 2457 % | 1977 % | 278 % | 881 % | 542 % |
| CO2 (Land use change) | ------- | -97 % | -96 % | -96 % | ------- | -37 % | -51 % | ------- | 73 % | ------- |
| Methane Production | 26 % | 286 % | 175 % | 472 % | 323 % | 252 % | 565 % | 429 % | 1929 % | 441 % |
| Freshwater Consumption | 53 % | 296 % | 2365 % | 206 % | 364 % | 321 % | 352 % | 649 % | 1341 % | 125 % |
| Fertilizer Consumption | 19 % | 772 % | 802 % | 270 % | 915 % | 452 % | 1182 % | 255 % | 494 % | 247 % |
| Pesticide Consumption | -19 % | 2018 % | 11214% | 380 % | 971 % | 2307 % | 226 % | 422 % | 160 % | ------- |
| Car Usage | 900 % | 7700 % | ------- | 600 % | ------- | 32350 % | 2750 % | 1800% | 2750% | 1200% |
| Defense Spending | ------- | 6973 % | ------- | 15057% | 21120% | 10510 % | ------- | 622 % | ------- | 3216% |
He concludes, "...we need to recognize the simple fact that the last thing this world needs is more Americans." What DinAlt means, is that in order to maintain our mechanized American way of life, we can't expect to have the rest of the world be encouraged to adopt it as well. We are already sacrificing individual freedoms to regulate the pollution we alone generate.
And that doesn't mean the negative impacts will only affect America, China, Europe, and other highly industrialized nations, continents and regions combining high consumption with high populations and/or immigration. The impacts, just like unregulated immigration, will not obey borders:
Larry West Explains,
http://environment.about.com/od/pollution/a/cross_border.htm"It’s a natural fact that wind and water don’t respect national boundaries. One country’s pollution quickly can, and often does, become another country’s environmental and economic crisis. And because the problem originates in another country, solving it becomes a matter of diplomacy and international relations, leaving the local people who are most affected with few real options.
A good example of this phenomenon is occurring in Asia, where cross-border pollution from China is causing serious environmental problems in Japan and South Korea as the Chinese continue to expand their economy at great environmental cost."
A planet of open borders, where half of the third world can become a fast food consuming, car driving, electricity dependent American with little effort in a matter of years, is hardly an issue of "equality" or disregarding one's place of birth; it's an issue of mutual international suicide.
We Americans already have trouble easing ourselves out of that destructive lifestyle, so why would encouraging the rest of the world to come here and adopt it be a valid solution, much less a humanitarian effort?
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More: http://esa.un.org/unpp/
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